Category Archives: Meditation

Beijing’s Nightlife: The Straight, The Queer, and The Ugly

“If you want to live an authentic, meaningful life, you need to master the art of disappointing and upsetting others, hurting feelings, and living with the reality that some people just won’t like you. It may not be easy, but it’s essential if you want your life to reflect your deepest desires, values, and needs.”
— Cheryl Richardson

Druid in the City: One Black Woman’s Loathe Letter

“I said, “No, I don’t see why.” After a moment I realized that I did know why. The reason was suddenly obvious to me. I said, “Actually, Mama, yes, I do see why. The men offered up the women because they were cowards and the worst kind of men possible. What kind of men offer up their daughters and wives to be raped in place of themselves?” Mama stared wide-eyed at me, then, very calmly, she said, “Ijeoma, you’re missing the point.” “What point?” “Don’t you see? If the men had offered themselves, it would have been an abomination. They offered up the girls so that things would be as God intended: man and woman instead of man and man. Do you see now?” A headache was rising in my temples. My heart was racing from bewilderment at what Mama was saying. It was the same thing she had said with the story of Lot. It was as if she were obsessed with this issue of abomination. How could she really believe that that was the lesson to be taken out of this horrible story? What about all the violence and all the rape? Surely she realized that the story was even more complex than just violence and rape. To me, the story didn’t make sense.”
― Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

Snap, Crackle, and Shot: Inspirations Behind Queer Photography

“The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through “Sleeping Beauty” that I met my first love, Ivar.
He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing. The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire.
Three things stood in my way. 1. The object of my affection didn’t know he was the object of my affection. 2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora. 3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn’t allowed to love a boy.” ― Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children

Dune – Of Barren Wastelands and Meditations on Touch

“Up until then, i’d never understood how people could just keep on living (…) Maybe I had a place to belong, but it wasn’t something definite, like a seat. It was flowing and formless… Perhaps inside of me, perhaps outside of me. A reason to live, the power to live, a place to belong in this world… I think the essence of that sweet nectar varies from person to person.”
― Nagata Kabi, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

Fairytales of Greener Grass and Other Fallacies

“In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it’s funny. But what people don’t think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don’t think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it’s a radical issue.”
― Edmund White

Homoromance – Intimacy Beyond Sexual and Gender Norms

“Did I want him to act? Or would I prefer a lifetime of longing provided we both kept this little Ping-Pong game going: not knowing, not-not-knowing, not-not-not-knowing? Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can’t say “yes,” don’t say “no,” say “later.” Is this why people say “maybe” when they mean “yes,” but hope you’ll think it’s “no” when all they really mean is, Please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

Compulsory Heterosexuality: One Silent Warrior’s Journey to Self-Discovery

Catherine. P Sometimes shortened to “comphet”, compulsory heterosexuality is a phenomenon that affects mostly women. Societal expectations to be heterosexual are often imposed on women more so than men. When this term was first popularized, it was purported that women are taught to value the relationships with men over those with women. The problem withContinue reading “Compulsory Heterosexuality: One Silent Warrior’s Journey to Self-Discovery”

Translating Black Femaleness Through the Chinese Gaze Pt 2

“We watch them dissolve in the air. They move through the sky, all at once. And bits of them sift, until they melt away so small that the eye can’t see, caught in the bridge’s wooden slats or in the river or into nothingness altogether, until we’re the only ones who’ll take the fact of their ever existing at all on with us, until we end up losing those memories, too, although even then they’ll still probably be around somewhere. It isn’t very beautiful.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

Stuck: Black, Unwell, and in Need of Care

“The real question is: Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? Why would they rather see themselves as harassed and transgressed instead of have a conversation that could reveal them as an equal participant in creating conflict? There should be a relief in discovering that one is not being persecuted, but actually, in the way we have misconstrued these responsibilities, sadly the relief is in confirming that one has been “victimized.” It comes with the relieving abdication of responsibility.”
― Sarah Schulman, Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

Translating Black Femaleness Through the Chinese Gaze

“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

Phoenix Rising: A Concept Queen’s Journey from Trauma to Glamor

“I remembered what it was like to walk a gauntlet of strangers who stare—their eyes angry, confused, intrigued. Woman or man: they are outraged that I confuse them. The punishment will follow. The only recognition I can find in their eyes is that I am “other.” I am different. I will always be different. I will never be able to nestle my skin against the comfort of sameness.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Great Sexpectations: Musings on a Convoluted Sexual Journey

“There’s this phenomenon that you’ll get sometimes—but not too often, if you’re lucky—where someone you think you know says something about your gayness that you weren’t expecting at all. Ben called it a tiny earthquake. I don’t think he was wrong. You’re destabilized, is the point. How much just depends on where the quake originates, the fault lines.”
― Bryan Washington, Memorial

The Smooth Talker

“Paul liked to pick out the secretly cool people, people too cool to flash their coolness. The cool people were not always or even usually the same as the shiny people. Often someone shiny was too conventionally good-looking to be cool but they were still compelling, in terms of sheer wattage. Paul knew he wasn’t good-looking enough to be shiny, but he could be cool in certain contexts. Cool was relational and conceptual; cool took work, cool was a meritocracy which, with all its flaws, he still preferred to the aristocracy of genetics.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

Queer it Up! Labels and Gender Identities

“I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn’t even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?”
― Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji

Consider This: Meditations of A Black, Queer Woman

“If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

Portraits of a Gay Man

“Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

A little Sugar in My Tank: My Black, Queer Agenda

“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.”
― Octavia E. Butler

Traslating Blackness Through the Chinese Gaze

“Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.”
Toni Morrison

My Story – A Beijing-Based Queer Woman’s Meditation

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”
Elizabeth Gilbert